And Democrats wouldn't even NEED a 60 vote supermajority if they had had the balls to kill the filibuster at the start of the session in 2009. They would have had a comfortable ~55 majority and could have passed damn near everything Pelosi sent them. They would have run the table for two years, and gone into the midterms with a shiat ton of wins.

But no.

It's almost as if they prefer endless bickering and gridlock, i.e., the status quo.

Mrtraveler01:WombatControl: Reagan didn't raise taxes - he had to compromise with Democrats in order to get other things done.

So he still gets the blame right?

Just like how the right blames Clinton for repealing Glass-Stegall after signing off on a bill the GOP drafted up in Congress and passed at a more unanimous rate than the Democrats?

And thank God Clinton signed that bill - because if Glass-Steagall hadn't been repealed, the collapse would have been worse. (Or, more likely Glass-Steagall would have been repealed as a response to the crisis.)

Shvetz:Bullshiat, bullshiat, bullshiat. Large companies are sitting on the money as retained earnings. It's not doing anything, it's not stimulating jack shiat. Again, it all boils down to the velocity of money. That dollar in food stamps is spent multiple times over. That tax cut for the wealthy? Yeah, a lot of times it actually does sit in personal accounts. Sure the stock market is doing well, but not everybody invests in it. In fact, most American consumers don't. Yet they still need customers to walk in and spend money.

Yeah, because if we just move money fast enough, that will mean the economy will improve. That's cargo cult economics - the velocity of money is a symptom of a healthy economy, not the cause. Money merely changing hands doesn't mean a damn thing unless that money is changing hands because of an economically valuable exchange.

And every time you move money around, you introduce transaction costs - unless the value of the exchange is greater than the transaction costs, you're actually harming the economy.

Your broken window parable is bullshiat as well. Again, that dollar in food stamps wouldn't have been doing anything. We can see that from the Bush tax cuts, which didn't generate anything. People just sat on the money.

Yeah, because the last thing we need is to have the economy growing at around 3% and unemployment at 5% - which is what we had after the Bush tax cuts.

Again, retained earnings shows up as shareholder equity. That puts more money into the economy - unless you really want to argue that changes in the stock market have no impact on people's lives. Which would be a phenomenally stupid argument.

Money in corporations never just sits. It either pays expenses, becomes working capital, or is shareholder equity. That's how balance sheets work.

WombatControl:And thank God Clinton signed that bill - because if Glass-Steagall hadn't been repealed, the collapse would have been worse. (Or, more likely Glass-Steagall would have been repealed as a response to the crisis.)

If we didn't deregulate the markets and allow them to do the things that got use into a financial crisis, then the markets would've done the things they wouldn't have been to do unless we deregulated the markets?

Well, SURE you are -- you have all the common sense of a cantaloupe. (No offense to any Cantaloupe-Americans). You don't get evidence that something DIDN'T happen, other than not having evidence that it did. You have no evidence that Elvis did NOT appear in my kitchen last night, and eat all my Twinkies. No evidence at all. Still, without evidence that he DID, you'd be an idiot (but I repeat myself) if you believed that.

In similar fashion, you are an idiot if you believe that the stimulus packages had any significant positive effect, when no positive effect can be seen, when even a relatively tiny $22B expense, put mostly into hiring, makes a very noticeable difference, as I show above.

It would have been MUCH better to just pass the money out. If divided equally, each household would have gotten more than $8,500 for each trillion dollars that went to Obama's cronies. Everybody having that much money would SURELY have had an effect that would be visible on the charts. Alternatively, the government could have hired 20 MILLION PEOPLE for a year at $50,000 each, and had them... well, who the hell cares? Clean up, watch kids in daycare centers, whatever. In case you are wondering, there are only 12.7 million unemployed in the U.S., so the money they flushed with "stimuli" could have put EVERY SINGLE UNEMPLOYED PERSON TO WORK FOR MORE THAN 18 months, and with a good job at that.

Leave it to Democrats to come up with a way to give away so much money -- that doesn't benefit the economy.

MikeMc:Well at least he grew out of that pothead phase and moved on to being a wildly successful junkie with a taste for Dominican child prostitutes...

You have no idea the fun you almost didn't miss out on. I did some work for an attorney here that was going to become a partner at his brother's firm. I think it was already underway and David caught wind of what was going on just in time to distance himself from the guy before he got disbarred and went to prison. For a while I thought the next thing I was going to hear about it was going to be on CNN.

WombatControl:Mrtraveler01: WombatControl: Reagan didn't raise taxes - he had to compromise with Democrats in order to get other things done.

So he still gets the blame right?

Just like how the right blames Clinton for repealing Glass-Stegall after signing off on a bill the GOP drafted up in Congress and passed at a more unanimous rate than the Democrats?

And thank God Clinton signed that bill - because if Glass-Steagall hadn't been repealed, the collapse would have been worse. (Or, more likely Glass-Steagall would have been repealed as a response to the crisis.)

Shvetz: Bullshiat, bullshiat, bullshiat. Large companies are sitting on the money as retained earnings. It's not doing anything, it's not stimulating jack shiat. Again, it all boils down to the velocity of money. That dollar in food stamps is spent multiple times over. That tax cut for the wealthy? Yeah, a lot of times it actually does sit in personal accounts. Sure the stock market is doing well, but not everybody invests in it. In fact, most American consumers don't. Yet they still need customers to walk in and spend money.

Yeah, because if we just move money fast enough, that will mean the economy will improve. That's cargo cult economics - the velocity of money is a symptom of a healthy economy, not the cause. Money merely changing hands doesn't mean a damn thing unless that money is changing hands because of an economically valuable exchange.

And every time you move money around, you introduce transaction costs - unless the value of the exchange is greater than the transaction costs, you're actually harming the economy.

Your broken window parable is bullshiat as well. Again, that dollar in food stamps wouldn't have been doing anything. We can see that from the Bush tax cuts, which didn't generate anything. People just sat on the money.

Yeah, because the last thing we need is to have the economy growing at around 3% and unemployment at 5% - which is what we had after the Bush tax cuts.

Again, retained earnings shows up as shareholder equity. That puts more money into the economy - unless you really want to argue that changes in the stock market have no impact on people's lives. Which would be a phenomenally stupid argument.

Money in corporations never just sits. It either pays expenses, becomes working capital, or is shareholder equity. That's how balance sheets work.

(Assuming shareholders are just like you and me...)The fraction that goes to the shareholders is kinda like what the dog that's been sitting near the dinner table gets after the people have finished eating.(Assuming shareholders are the people with most of the money already....) The fraction that goes to the shareholders is kinda like mutual masturbation.

So the stimulus didn't turn your turds into a rose bush. But to say it did "nothing" is just willful ignorance of weapons-grade variety.

Well, then, it should be easy for you to show just where the benefits show up. I mean, a TRILLION dollars is a LOT of money, so it should have a large, immediately visible effect. And that effect is...

WombatControl:Money in corporations never just sits. It either pays expenses, becomes working capital, or is shareholder equity. That's how balance sheets work.

Or it just sits...case in point - Apple. Apple is currently sitting on 100 billion dollars in cash or near cash assets. And that's down from $110 billion. They bought some shares back, paid their first dividend in years, made a few nickel and dime acquisitions and are spending a small fortune suing competitors but basically are sitting on the overwhelming majority of the money. Call it "shareholder equity" if you like but it's really just money doing nothing.

GeneralJim:dickfreckle: So the stimulus didn't turn your turds into a rose bush. But to say it did "nothing" is just willful ignorance of weapons-grade variety.Well, then, it should be easy for you to show just where the benefits show up. I mean, a TRILLION dollars is a LOT of money, so it should have a large, immediately visible effect. And that effect is...

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, more commonly known as the stimulus bill, has been featured in more than 130 TV ads this year, according to a database maintained by Kantar Media's Campaign Media Analysis Group. In many of those ads, Republicans claim the bill has "failed" (a matter of opinion) or state (correctly) that unemployment has gone up since President Barack Obama signed the bill into law on Feb. 17, 2009. The national unemployment rate was 8.2 percent in February 2009, and it now stands at 9.6 percent, having peaked at 10.1 percent in October 2009.But it's just false to say that the stimulus created "no jobs" or "failed to save and create jobs" or "has done nothing to reduce unemployment" - or similar claims that the stimulus did not produce any jobs.

As we have written before, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released a report in August that said the stimulus bill has "[l]owered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.8 percentage points" and "ncreased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million."

Simply put, more people would be unemployed if not for the stimulus bill. The exact number of jobs created and saved is difficult to estimate, but nonpartisan economists say there's no doubt that the number is positive.

That seems like a visible effect. But I forgot that the CBO numbers are invalid unless it backs up a Conservative argument.

he zero-job claim is not credible for a simple reason: The stimulus did put people to work.

Virginia's public schools and higher education institutions have reported the Recovery Act allowed them to create 996 jobs through the end of June 2011 and save 6,042 positions, according to Charles Pyle, communications director for the state Department of Education.

The White House has posted on its stimulus website a listing of jobs funded by the stimulus, breaking it down by state and congressional district. For the quarter that ended June 30, the nation had reported 545,262 full-time equivalent jobs funded by the Recovery Act -- including 11,604 in Virginia..

The president's Council of Economic Advisers, in a report released in March, estimated that between 2.5 million and 3.6 million jobs were created or saved by the stimulus through the fourth quarter of 2010.

Separately, the council's report cited four independent analyses by the Congressional Budget Office and three private economic analysis companies. Here's what the groups found:

All you need to know. Obama has been for all the things on top, the things that are creating jobs and economic stimulus, and therefore government revenue. See the return on food stamps? Food stamps actually pay for themselves. The Bush tax cuts? Negative returns.

You keep using this slanted image as though it were fact. Why not try to cite some documentation (from an unbiased source) instead of posting a ideological image?

Moody's is now biased towards food stamps? Do your homework, the numbers are good

You showed a picture not text.. Post a real link. That isn't the exact report and you (should) know that...

GeneralJim:dickfreckle: So the stimulus didn't turn your turds into a rose bush. But to say it did "nothing" is just willful ignorance of weapons-grade variety.Well, then, it should be easy for you to show just where the benefits show up. I mean, a TRILLION dollars is a LOT of money, so it should have a large, immediately visible effect. And that effect is...

The benefits were 40% of the stimulus were tax cuts. Show us how that has stimulated the economy.

EnviroDude:its the daily kooks. they never lie about republicans or the failures of the democrats.

foggy memories seem to forget that Obama had a super majority in the senate and a majority in the house for the first year of his term. this invalidates every republican attempt to stop legislation

Wow, one whole year, huh? A year spent getting things in place, getting policies off the ground, filling appointments for different positions. A year i which Obama learned that trying to play nice with the GOP was quite possibly a losing tactic. Also a year in which people didn't vote a straight Party line.

Maybe if he wanted to use the Republicans' 'Fark the country' approach, he could have ramrodded stuff through, but most politicians actually still remember why they wanted to run for public office in the first place. You can't believe that the Right is going to be this big of pricks until it actually happens.

Yeah, major policy changes right out of the gate, that's how it happens...

We have trillion dollar deficits every year and not a single government program ever actually has to spend less money than they did last year.

Yeah, the GOP is basically the same party as the Democrats, only with less focus on social bureaucracy and Draconian regulation, and more focus on military. At least we get a choice: Sharp stick to the eye, or cricket bat to the nuts -- YOU get to choose!

GeneralJim:Well, let's try this: Zero unemployment for 18 months by using the same money to hire every single unemployed person. Show where the "stimulus" did better than that. Dumbass.

I guess I just look at this differently, I don't see the point of arguing about ifs and would haves.

All of this can be boiled down to what you define as the outcome the stimulus was supposed to have versus what your predictions of what would have happened if it was never done. There's a hell of a lot of wiggle room in there to make whatever case you want to make.

Mrtraveler01:If we didn't deregulate the markets and allow them to do the things that got use into a financial crisis, then the markets would've done the things they wouldn't have been to do unless we deregulated the markets?

[www.lolwut.com image 533x594]

Except Glass-Steagall had nothing to do with credit default swaps, mortgage-backed securities, or any of the things that actually caused the crisis. Allowing investment and commercial banks to hold mutual interests allowed the diversified banks to buy up assets from the failing banks, helping stabilize the markets.

sno man:(Assuming shareholders are just like you and me...)The fraction that goes to the shareholders is kinda like what the dog that's been sitting near the dinner table gets after the people have finished eating.(Assuming shareholders are the people with most of the money already....) The fraction that goes to the shareholders is kinda like mutual masturbation.

No, that's utterly wrong. Repeat after me:

Assets = Liabilities + Owner's Equity

Do you have a retirement account? A pension? A mutual fund? Then you are a shareholder is a public corporation. And when a corporation allegedly "sits" on money, that, by definition, becomes part of owner's equity. A balance sheet must balance. And that means that the value of your shares is greater, which means that your retirement account has more money for your retirement, etc.

It's shocking how many people have no clue how finance works - if all you know is that one equation, you can at least start thinking about basic finance in an intelligent manner - but you can actually graduate from high school in this country having never even looked at a balance sheet...

HellRaisingHoosier:I don't have it in me to blame everything on the Republicans; but a record breaking amount of obstructionism, combined with attacking their own ideas and policies just because a Democrat likes them ... well, it certainly ain't gonna gain the Republicans my vote in the upcoming election.

This is what I was trying to say in another post. The current GOP policy only plays well to people who are going to vote for them anyway. It doesn't engender the critical swing vote.

It's like a small market sports team blowing their whole marketing budget on hometown fans who don't need motivation to support the team. What they should be doing is going regional and recruiting new fans from nearby states. The GOP is doing absolutely NOTHING to appeal to rational folks who are genuinely weighing the issues while they sit on the fence. Obama isn't the liberal I thought he might be (regardless of blame), but he has at least gotten some sh*t done. It's more than I can expect from some reactionary wingnut or, worse, a Romney-bot who takes orders but otherwise has the vision and passion of a Pepsi machine. Player pianos aren't as predictable as these assholes who keep spewing the same failed lines.

dickfreckle:This is what I was trying to say in another post. The current GOP policy only plays well to people who are going to vote for them anyway. It doesn't engender the critical swing vote.

I think you're right, and that's the reason why I can't get too worked up about them. I don't understand why so many people here think the Republicans are the boogey man. It's a dying party, with an ever dwindling number of true believers.

On the other hand, I see a lot of the same on another forum I visit that leans right. Oh my god the Obammer is going to outlaw the bible! It's retarded.

The only thing I can come up with it that this manufactured drama imparts meaning to a pretty empty life.